The Word Works

What a delight to receive fresh orders for Radha Marcum's PINE SOOT TENDON BONE, to be reminded of Cyrus Cassells' summary: "Marcum invites us to feel and sense more deeply our dynamic, contradictory world, insisting time and again on attentive poetry’s gorgeous music and crisp, accurate magic." And this poem! That calms, that reminds, that steadies the lucky reader.
(Available at online bookstores and at our website: https://bit.ly/3Rifu5S)

Pine Soot Tendon Bone - Word Works Books By Radha Marcum Pine Soot Tendon Bone (the traditional ingredients of Japanese Sumi-e inkstone) is a work of absorbing, unerring description that celebrates the natural world’s wonders and consolations, while nimbly acknowledging, in almost the same breath, the persistence of annihilating, at-larg...

We're savoring the release of *form a more perfect* by Marina Blitshteyn. Winner of the Tenth Gate Prize, Blitshteyn pushes the boundaries of what it means to belong, and has written, according to Elizabeth Clark Wessel, "an astonishing book, as sonically rich as it is intellectually rigorous. Its subjects range from migration, class, gender, and all types of Otherness to the minor tendernesses of life when you are young and in love in the city. Blitshteyn is dueling with language while dancing. Her wordplay rewires how we hear. She can take a familiar phrase and tweak it in a way that excavates its deep structures. She speaks to us like we are her beloved. She can be raw, witty, wry. Her work is visually arresting and formally voracious, her ear the best of her generation. I cannot wait for you to read this book."
(Available at your favorite online bookstore or at our website https://bit.ly/3R4abXz)

form a more perfect - Word Works Books By Marina Blitshteyn Was it always like this? What was it like back then? Why do some sit in cafés while others live on the street? What’s the worst that can happen? These are questions to conjure with, and in asking them, among many others equally trenchant, the linguistically alert poems of for...

Happy, happy pub day to Marina Blitshteyn's *form a more perfect*! Richard Hoffman, the judge of the Tenth Gate Prize who selected this book for publication, says this: "Was it always like this? What was it like back then? Why do some sit in cafés while others live on the street? What's the worst that can happen? These are questions to conjure with, and in asking them, among many others equally trenchant, the linguistically alert poems of form a more perfect conjure a vision of our common life that is emancipatory, clear, fresh, and exciting. Crossing borders of language, of class, of this or that expectation, Blitshteyn’s concentrated and incandescent poems are pleasurably unsettling, even liberating. Profane, vulgar, beautiful, and deeply nourishing—the poems in form a more perfect bear witness to the tragedy of our unravelling, yet somehow manage to dance while carrying that weight."
(Available at your favorite online bookseller or from our website at https://bit.ly/3R4abXz)

form a more perfect - Word Works Books By Marina Blitshteyn Was it always like this? What was it like back then? Why do some sit in cafés while others live on the street? What’s the worst that can happen? These are questions to conjure with, and in asking them, among many others equally trenchant, the linguistically alert poems of for...